


A Chord - The Composers

by misslonelyhearts



Series: Other Than We Were [4]
Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 16:38:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A place to collect all the short-fic and drabbles associated with the A Chord verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dvořák

“Why here?”  Anders murmurs.  Though, with his chin snagging on the elastic at my hips, lips caught in a delicious drag from navel to parts lower, the sound of it is more like ‘wai hurr?’

“Because it’s cheaper than a hotel.”  I reply, and he laughs less at my joke than at the way my head bangs against the piano when he licks me.  In his mouth, it’s like summer and pressure.  I’m there, but I’m also in the practice room, eyes rolling over the contoured ceiling when they should be trained on the little window in the door.  We booked it for more than this, but I’m not complaining.  Anders pulls me to the edge of the bench and my elbows slip to the keys.  Or where the keys would be if I hadn’t put the lid down.  One day practicality simply won’t occur to me.  With the hot palm cupping me through my briefs, I don’t know if I’m glad it’s not today.   I mutter, “Fuck.  Who needs Dvořák?”

When the reddened mouth slides off me, when it smiles, I’d like so much to just live in it.  Where it’s slick and in love.  Anders nods, “Didn’t I say that not ten minutes ago?”

“You can’t do this every time you don’t want to practice.”  There’s not a part of me that believes a word I’ve said.  Mostly because the arch of an eyebrow is followed by the return of summer, wet and humming over my cock.  And who wouldn’t chuck out a centuries-dead git for that every time?


	2. Bach

It takes a minute, while he gulps air and we slump in the stall with the random thump of the Man’s crowd behind thin walls. It takes a minute for him to discover what I’ve done. But he gets to it.

“That was …”Anders licks his lips and doesn’t tuck himself back into his corduroys right away. Not with me using him to gain my feet. He smiles. “I thought you were rehearsing Bach these days. Not bloody cocksucking.”

“Enjoying the art of practice usually mean I excel faster.” I rub myself and think of the crud that’s probably on my knees. But I also take a moment to watch Anders breathe, back against the stall, and hook a lazy finger into my waistband with eyes wide open.

He moves on me while it sinks in, either the muscle-relief or his appreciation, and he’ll figure out what else is in store soon enough. It just takes a minute while he pushes me harder to the opposite wall, opening my jeans. Then he gets to it.

“Can’t compete with your musical prowess, but…” Lips on my nose, my chin, kissing while his hands go from needy to groping, halted curiosity. Anders looks at me dead in the eye, hot fingers cupping. “Did you …shave your balls?”

“If I did?” God, was it stupid? Even if he asks I won’t have a proper reason why.

“You sneaky devil! Oh, that’s marvelous.” He whispers, a sound so fucking pleased I could die, and watches my eyes, how it tickles straight through me when his middle finger slides back and forth. We’re slipping down the stall until Anders puts a hand to my chest and sinks to the floor. Somewhere in the bar beyond the stall, beyond the door we locked, a woman cackles loud as a goose. And it feels as prickly as I will in a few days. 

But before that, I get a tongue like velvet. I get tasted for more surprises. I get everything, and struggle not to feel like I didn’t earn it at all.


	3. Domestic Meme

  * **who cooks normally?**  
Anders.  I had been in the habit, living alone, of cooking basic meals for myself or eating out when practice ran long.  But since he’s been here I…find myself buying things specifically for him to cook.  He likes it.  From what he says, there wasn’t much opportunity to cook for himself in the past few years.  He appears to be making up for lost time.   
  
He makes a superb lasagna.  And try as I might I can’t make something that should be as simple as a salad nearly as well as he does.  There’s always a surprising bit…cranberries or candied nuts or pomegranate seeds or sommat.


  * **how often do they fight?**  
I think we tend to tip-toe around the topics that hold too much resentment.  Maybe we shouldn’t.  He’s…anxious sometimes, forgetting that there’s little he can hide from those who know him best.  And if I let it gain traction in  _me_  I’ll push him to explain and then it’s a row. He cleans the flat while we fight, scrubbing the counters and putting things away.  
  
We don’t fight, actually.  We disagree.  And in all these years it’s a mark in our favor, I think, that we don’t use hateful, disrespectful language.  We come to an argument as people who …love each other and want to understand.  It feels very different from the way I fought with my father and mother.  The way Thomas and I used to fight.
  * **what do they do when they’re away from each other?**  
Well, for seven years I practiced being a sullen bastard.  I have no idea what Anders did.  And I’m coming to a point where that part needs to be out.  But, in recent days…Anders tends to write, with the record player going and every single light on.  When he’s not here I watch entirely too much telly, forget to eat, and stay up until three in the morning looking up things on the internet.  
  
Like possible evidence of aquatic life on Europa.  That sort of thing.  
  

  * **nicknames for each other?  
** I bloody well hope not.  **makes a face** I suppose Anders calls me ‘love’ now again.  For all I can remember I’ve probably called him the same.Years ago, Sigrun and Lilah called me ‘brohim’ after an unpleasant run-in with an ex at a Jewish deli.    
 ****  

  * **who is more likely to pay for dinner?  
** I am.  Unless it’s street-food.  In which case Anders almost always knows the best places, knows the vendors’ names by heart, and insists on paying (and tipping too much). ****  
  

  * **who steals the covers at night?**    
Anders.  If it’s too hot for the blanket it invariably ends up piled on me, too.  If it’s too cold Anders ends up with the blankets AND me piled on him.    
  

  * **what would they get each other for gifts?**  
I’m shit with gifts.  I think I’ve given Anders more books than he could comfortably read.  Not terribly romantic. And clothes.  Though God knows why since he prefers to wear things that were obviously never his, including my own clothes.  The most successful gift I …time, really.  That’s it.  I made time.  Answered no calls and didn’t open the laptop all weekend.  That was my shining achievement in gift-giving.  I was…well-rewarded.  
  
He’s very good at gifts.  I still have most everything he’s ever given me.  And why I kept some of them when it bloody hurt to even look at them I’ll never know.  I suppose that’s the mark of a truly great gift. Or an all-consuming attachment to the giver, I don’t know.  For years I opened and closed the soft pouch of violin tools he’d given me every day.  And every day i thought of him when i did it.  The rosin and polish were used and refilled, and I could have replaced the original cloth, but I didn’t.  It’s nearly a rag now.


  * **who kissed who first?  
** It pains me to say I didn’t have the courage to do it first.  I had plenty of opportunity.  Anders is a shameless flirt, and I don’t suppose that surprises anyone who’s spent more than ten minutes with him.  It pains me because we wasted time.  I hate that.  Bless him, he went for the snogging right off.  I was…helpless to resist.  (Not really, though, unless you count holding him tighter than strictly necessary on a half-empty dance floor the actions of a helpless man).  
  
The second time.  We had a second time to have a first kiss (is that lucky?  I can never decide).  The second time it was me because it had to be.  
 ****  

  * **who made the first move?**  
Much like the previous question this is sort of tied into the situation as a whole.  Anders flirted…it took some time to suss out if I was just another bystander, or a true target.  Once it was settled, I’d argue that though technically he kissed me first, it would hardly have happened without my encouragement.  Yes, my hands were very encouraging.  Always have been.  
  
And the second time.  Me again.  
  

  * **who remembers things?  
** I do.  Anders tends to …amplify things in his mind.  Not to say he’s wrong, or his memory is bollocks, it’s just that…where facts are concerned I favor the objective variety while Anders displays a flagrant disregard for reality.  He remembers things on a colorful level, embellished, emotional.  My brain looks more like a tidy file cabinet.Once, Anders joked that he could hear my mind typing, like some mental stenographer, just so I could read his words back to him during a later argument. ****  
  

  * **who started the relationship?  
** This again.  Is it important?  Is it a matter of national pride? Will there be a commemorative day?  Will there be no post?  _WE_  started the relationship.   _WE_  feel inordinately lucky to have one at all.  Thanks. ****  
  

  * **who cusses more?  
** Me.  Unreservedly.  And the longer he stays, I’d wager Anders will develop the same habit and outstrip me for cleverness.I only wish my sainted mother had lived long enough to hear me grow into it as I have.  Lilah approves, of course.  She’s worse than all of us put together. ****  
  

  * **what would they do if the other one was hurt?**  
It’s …look, I don’t know.    
  
No, I do know.  
  
He could have been dead for all I knew. We’ve done this part, so I bloody well know.   I went sodding mad imagining what could have happened to him. Can you even think of it? That kind of fear?  One day just …gone.  No touch, no ghost left behind.  I saved the sim card from my old mobile just to…  
  
Everyone says ‘lying in a ditch’ and that, like it’s a bloody joke. Missing is worse than dead.  _Not knowing is the worst pain._ Now.  Now, If he was hurt I’d be able to survive if I just…if i knew where he was, what happened.  And he’d never hear the end of it.  
  
As for Anders.  Well, I can only guess can’t I?    
  
He’s hard on things he loves, to the point of making you wonder …what it is that makes him hold so tight, and exhaust it. Almost break it.  But that’s his love.  His way.  Who can say it’s wrong?  So, it’s different now, but it doesn’t change that need.    
  
If I were hurt, he’d move heaven and earth to make it right. That’s what I think. Day by day I’m close to believing he’s capable of something so miraculous.




	4. Webber

I spend the first few nights with him remembering all the conversations we used to have about what he’d say if he could talk, if he’d have an American accent, be a simple-sounding creature or astute. For a cat. I spend these nights remembering how Anders had sprawled on my chest and teased Pounce’s paws until the cat flattened his ears and slunk away. 

Often as not I’d always imagined Pounce to have a vast cache of words for us that basically boiled down to ‘acceptable idiots.’

But that had been another place and time.

Now I’m trying so hard to ignore the mad, orange swish of his tail because he hasn’t left the bed even though it’s been bouncing beneath us for a half hour.  It rattles against the wall as Anders thrusts. 

“Nate, I’m losing you.” 

“No, you’re n-”  I trail off, wrapping Anders’ fingers tighter around us both where I am, indeed, going soft.  Fucking cat.  I breathe and turn my head but I can still hear him purring through our panting. “Get him off, will you.”

“Got my hands full, sorry,” Anders grinds against me, bending to kiss my chest like he thinks it’ll hide that smirk. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter when he jacks our cocks together making me tense upward, grip his hair and hold him down to me.  Like I could melt us into one and somehow still get that friction.

Pounce flops onto his side, away from us, and the bed goes on bouncing.

“See?  It’s fine,” Anders huffs, twisting the cup of his palm, and I’ve forgotten what we were talking about at all when I kiss him, tongue his teeth and bite his lip.  His hips twitch, throat deadening his low moan, and we’re wet, belly to belly, as I follow seconds after.

Pounce has got nothing to say about it.  Not even when we’re cleaned up and sweat-cool beneath the sheets with Anders sprawled like a memory, not heavy exactly, on my chest.  The cat just looks back at us over his fuzzy shoulder, blinking while we talk.

“You can’t close a door on a cat, you know.”

“So it would seem,” I say, and it’s maybe a few minutes before I realize I’m stroking fur with one hand, and with the other tucking my fingers through damp hair, falling asleep to the animal and the man as they drift, gold to black to dreaming, beside me.


	5. Khan

“I have a cold.”

“All the more reason,” Sigrun says, scooping out chana and saag paneer.

She won’t stop until I’m dead of curry, flames disintegrating what’s left of my tongue.

So the takeaway gets spread out on the coffee table, and I’m dizzy with a fever Sigrun insists is imaginary, only able to stare like a drugged dog at everyone’s knees folded under them on the floor.  Anders tears into the naan, sopping at the food on his plate.

“They never bring enough,” says Lilah.

“Aha! That’s why I always order extra,” Sigrun replies, peeling back the foil on a second pouch of flatbread.

“And that’s why I love you so.”

“I have a few appreciable skills.”  They grin at each other and I notice that my sister is barefoot.  Everyone is barefoot, in fact, including Anders.  My black socks are the only anomaly, and I’m too miserable in my own snotty head to do anything but pull my sweater tighter and feel my jaw ache where I’m clenching it.

“Please don’t elaborate,” I say, more peevish than I’d like to sound during this impromptu celebration.

“Grumpy Gus.” Anders rubs my back and drops the last samosa on my overburdened plate.

She’s back.  I can hug her any time I like. 

They’re here to stay in that very real way, the kind of reality with change-of-address forms and furniture delivery. So while they chatter, and Delilah eats from my plate without asking, I am happier than my bloody head cold lets on. It makes me happy like Indian takeaway does not, and better still is how Sigrun knows, she  _knows_  before I even ask them, to spend their first night back in London with us. 

When I shuffle off to bed, they’re crammed on the couch with every blanket I own, here, instead of trekking back to Highgate for the night.

Some time after I’ve dropped into medicated bliss, I feel Anders creep in behind me under the body-warm cocoon of sheets and heavy wool.  His fingers and toes aren’t cold for long.

.

It’s three in the morning when I wake up famished.  But I’m also not alone. 

Yes, the flat is full of sleeping people, and the soft smack of Pounce’s claws on some poor beetle trapped in the rug, but I’m also not alone in my late-night foraging.  Lilah’s got the cold leftovers out, sliding them onto the kitchen table quiet as a mouse.  She gives me a wink, impish in the light from the refrigerator.

“Have a nosh?”

“Please,” I whisper back.

We eat at the table in the nook, moonlight and streetlamps from the bay window holding us a little apart from the rest of the flat where it’s nearly black.  Me in my trouser socks and the heaviest robe from the back of the closet.  Delilah in her same clothes, mussed hair, with Sig’s leather jacket hanging off her.  She chews on cold jasmine rice, sighing happily.  Deep snorfling sounds emanate from under the blanket on the couch, and I suppress a laugh.

“I never knew she was that bad,” I say, digging into the masala straight from the container.

“I’ll take snoring over kicking any day,” Lilah says, low voice like I remember from sneaking in past curfew …finding her smoking in the garden out back.  She’s older of course, but not by much. Her face is blue and silver, sleepy eyes blinking down at her food, and I can hug her if I want. 

Why do I want to so badly?

I settle for squeezing her hand.

“Welcome back and all that,” I say.

“And all that,” she replies, clinking her fork with mine.


	6. Paganini

It’s become a thing I do with more regularity, more easy need than ever before, picking up the violin to play specs and spots of music that clamor in me when I am doing nothing more than lurching around the flat.  I hear Anders moving in the kitchen, mumbling to Pounce, and it just happens.  The smell of him, the scuffle of slippers, the pull of questions, inextricable from love, straight from the center of my chest …it happens like waking or blinking and I do not put it off when it comes.

I’d intended to get dressed, but there is a Caprice winding through the muscle of my bow arm, so instead of trousers I scoop up the Huberman and sit on the bed.   The fourth.  The fourth Caprice flows, and reaches the thickened tips of my fingers to fasten them, clinging like magnets to the strings.  I draw the bow and watch the white hair press into Paganini’s sorrow.   For a time, I bend into it until the piece arches upward into joy, lifting my shoulders, and that’s when I feel the bed dip.

He’s whispering something.

The Caprice stutters when he cups me, loose, before starting to stroke. And I can hold onto this for whatever that means, for whichever skill is being tested, so I play while Anders licks his fingers and returns to pumping me slowly.

His chest at my back matches me for movement, the way I breathe and how I have to jerk with the bow, with how he’s wrapped and dragging with just enough pressure to make me bite my lip. Perfect, even if the music’s not.

He whispers again and I finally hear it right because I’ve lost the plot with Paganini, holding the bow to one side and the violin on the other.  Thumb running just under the head, Anders milks me and says into the back of my ear, “Just for me. Come just for me, love.”

 _Yes_  and  _when did I not?_

Looking down at those fingers because I have to, heart chittering to finish the Caprice on its own, I’m the best mess he ever made. 

Anders kisses my shoulder, free hand carding the loose hair at my neck.  If I’m buying cat food, if I’m getting the tea, if I’m pushing the violin away and reaching back to pull him closer.

If I hitch and grumble and love how he never closes his bathrobe. I do it for him. I come.

And it’s not a finish but a start.


	7. Grieg

Sigrun rings me when I’ve got two bags full of groceries to shift, so I slip the the wrist-cracking weight of milk and tinned soup and the box of croutons to my left hand.  
  
“Can you give me ten minutes, Sig, I’m just-”  
  
“This place gives me the wig, you know.”  
  
She means the Highgate house.  I can’t disagree, though, because even as kids we’d never felt warmth there, everything clean and old and untouchable.  We never knew what fingerprints looked like, Lilah and me, until we were well older.  
  
“Lookit, can I-?” The bags continue cutting welts into my palm while the lift takes a millenium to shudder down to the lobby.  Behind the mechanical racket I hear something else, but between Sigrun’s voice in my ear and the ache in my arm, I can’t focus on what’s happening upstairs.  
  
“She says he’s working steady now,” Sigrun says like she knows, which she does.  What I’m supposed to tell her is if it’ll stick.  If  _Anders_  means to stick. Some people equate salary with stability and Sigrun sits at the top of that group.  Strange for a girl who quit her uni job to study tattooing in Germany.  Even so, she’d stuck to it until uni came calling her back.  
  
“Yes we’ve all got jobs, love,” I say, sliding the gate open. “Spend a fortnight in the house and you sound like mum already.  You’re haunted.”  
  
“Cold enough for haunting, sure,” she mutters. “Izzat my breath I see, or the ghost of-”  
  
 _“OY!”_  
 _“Knock it off!”_  
 _“Don’t think I won’t call!”_  
  
Voices shout down the hallway, down the shaft, a volley of my neighbours’ crankiest tones, and the lift finally puts me level with what’s going on. A tremendous clatter of piano notes fills the building. Coming from my flat.  
  
“Call you back,” I say knowing Sigrun is still talking when I hang up, dropping the phone in my pocket.  At first it’s just noise to me, because the piece isn’t meant for piano, and it’s certainly not the kind of crescendo that can be appreciated in a smallish flat surrounded by angry rent-payers.   
  
But when he starts it over again, I know what Anders is up to. What’s filling up his wrists and running down his fingers is Peer Gynt’s bounding, bumbling escape from the Troll King.  
  
My heart bangs right along under the hammers in the baby grand.  Like it’s something I should fear, but can’t.  Dark as it is, stirring up the ire of my neighbours…Anders plays it like nothing I’ve heard. A non-sequitur racket in the middle of a Sunday, played so loud, with so much passion.  
  
In the hallway, peeking out of their doors and pitching their displeasure at me are: Edward the faux-handbag retailer, in his sport coat ensemble and grotty house slippers; the new couple at the end of the hall (still don’t know their names); and Mrs. Jeager, who’s shared a wall with me for ten years.  
  
This last makes me cringe, but even though I’m reddening as I pass the others, as they mutter at me  _Do something about him, won’t you?_  and  _It’s not right to go on like that!_  Mrs. Jeager only squeezes my shoulder and tells me  _It’s been a half hour, tops_  and  _Good luck, dear._    
  
So I’m standing at my flat with the weight of their anger added to the grocery bags. My shoulders sink lower, and when I open the door there’s a blast of sound that makes them all retreat.  
   
They’ll think I’m going in to stop him.  But how could I?  
  
The door shuts and I pass him to put the milk away, keeping quiet.  I’m shedding my coat when he finally glances up, nodding to the open laptop serving as sheet music, and I read over his shoulder as Ginzburg takes Grieg’s orchestral piece to tendon-numbing places. Anders is bent and sweating, forearms strained and fingers hacking at the keys like Linus at his toy piano.  He’ll never be a virtuoso, never play for anyone but himself, and I put aside the notion that it matters at all because he’s astonishing right now.  
  
Gynt tumbles through the mountain passages as Anders plays, and I sit on the floor with Pounce’s chin on my knee, neighbours forgotten, not sure which of us animals is more unnerved and in love.  At the end of it he’s played the piece through at least twice, barely stopping, and gives the final flourish all his strength. A glissando punctuated by a hit of five notes.    
  
Then, it’s over.  And I watch his quick breathing, watch his back as if it were a cocoon about to split open, like there’s a creature I’d known in there, recognized through the shell, just waiting for a little rebirth on a Sunday afternoon.  
  
He stretches with a massive sigh, joints popping, turning to me.  
  
“Lunch then?” His eyebrows go up, disappearing where his hair’s loose and in his face.  
  
“Anders, what was all that?”  
  
He looks down at the floor where Pounce wends between his legs.  
  
“Norwegian,” he says, rubbing his arms. “They gave me a page of Norwegian to translate and I thought of…well I thought of Ibsen. And Grieg, of course.”  
  
If I were not me, I’d laugh.  It’s what people do when a funny pinball of a man pings between what he should be and what he thinks the world wants him to be.  Funnier still is my jumper on him, a striped crewneck that only took one French seaman joke to get it tossed into the back of the wardrobe.    
  
But Anders has never needed me to think he’s hilarious.  
  
On the coffee table beside me there are file folders and documents, hospital records requiring translation, and it’s the most mundane thing I’ve ever seen with his name stuck on it.  It’s work, though, and it’s sticking.  I’d only interrupted Anders’ way of getting through it.  
  
“Norwegian. Ibsen. Grieg,” I say, getting to my knees at the piano bench and massaging his arms, his wrists, where they’re likely throbbing.  He lets me even though I’m having a laugh, in my way.  “Naturally.”  
  
I take the muscles of his forearm and roll them between my thumbs until Anders, this sometimes chrysalis escapee, makes a pleasant sound in his throat.  When I look up his eyes are bright, wet.  
  
“I’m sorry about the neighbours.”  
  
“Piss on them,” I say immediately.  _Except Mrs.Jeager_. And I sit up fully to kiss him, to find the damp hair at the back of his neck, and hold him so tight he grumbles into my mouth.  Too much and never enough, as I’m always going to be.  Still, he takes my hands and pushes them up under the jumper at the precise moment I’d meant to do the very thing.  
  
“Mm, did you get croutons?” he asks against my forehead, kissing the permanent wrinkles there.  
  
I grip his waist, sliding him forward on the bench.  
  
“The day you ask for something and I come back without it,” I say, looking up at him while working his fly, tucking my hand inside, “will be the day you can start worrying.”  
  
He doesn’t close his eyes.  
  
And that’s the trick. What gets me hard enough to pound nails. A hand in his trousers and my own awkward professions.  The kind of eye-contact where Anders just falls apart from the lines between his brows down to the crooked smile disintegrating to need, down to my cold fingertips going hot around his cock.  
  
My hands are full of him, but he won’t let go of my face, won’t stop kissing me raw and pulling where my hair’s longest to tilt my head.  
  
“Lean back,” I manage, breaking the kiss, breathing hard and stroking him dry.   
  
“Nate…fuckin hell.”  
  
Whole, with no preamble of teasing or licking. Just as much as I can and then some without gagging, to get him wet. I hear the keys under his elbows making a nonsense tune the same as a cat walking across it.  Sticking with me, and sticky, and I suck him to get at the string of curses that’s his own brand of awkward declaration.  _Bloodyfuck. Lovenghyes._  
  
He couldn’t translate it if he wanted to.  I want him to.  _Jeg elsker deg_. Only if he means it, and it so often tastes like he does.  Feels like it sliding over my tongue, and how he tries to hold my hand.  
  
When his hips start to jump, and he’s coming with a jaw-grinding moan, I’m so crazy for him that I use my free hand to yank open my jeans, bringing myself off right there into the dust bunnies under the bench, Anders’ legs twitching around me and the piano keys a too-loud melody of deep thunder and tiny chimes tinkling.    
  
And if I weren’t me I’d laugh for the neighbours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> super special thanks to spicyshimmy, who beta'd for me on this one. thanks dollface.


	8. Prokofiev

He covers his face, digging the tapered tips of his fingers into his eyes.  Beneath the cup of his hand, he says, “I had the weirdest dream.”

“Don’t try and explain it,” I mumble. “It never comes out right.  Never as interesting to someone else as it is to you.”

“You’re probably right,” Anders says.  But he flips onto his side, looking at me and wiggling his fingers over the sheets to illustrate what I’ve already advised to keep to himself.  “So weird, though. I was an inspector at a crime scene. . .but not really.  And I ate a kebab that was supposed to be evidence.  No one was bothered.”

If I ever had the capacity for imagination, it doesn’t surprise me to find it lacking now. _A kebab, really?_

“Was I in it?” I ask, and feel the dumb chalk of it dusting up in my throat. Bloody stupid question, the worst of its kind given the usual response.

“No.”  

_Of course._

Anders stares at me with the crevasse of two pillows to separate us, and where his brows are pinched lay all the silent _I’m sorrys_ for how this hurts me.  It’s dreaming, though, and he’s not responsible for that. I’m a twat to hate him for it.

It’s no different than any of the months before this one, or even, as I think about it, the years prior to his leaving.  And I don’t want to obsess, but the weather in the bed turns dark and The Seven Years falls out like late season snow.  It ruins. . .I ruin . . .everything.

I want to ask him if he’d dreamt of me, even once, in all that time.  

Instead, I lay quietly blinking at the grey light cast over the ceiling and wait for him to get out of bed. Pounce fills the spot immediately, curling into what’s left of Anders’ warmth half on the pillow and half on the duvet.  
  
“What about you?” he says from the other room.  “Any interesting dreams?”  
  
“No.” I reply, but I’m a storm of _yes_. _You are the most interesting thing about me, even while I’m asleep._   
  
The catalog of dreams I can remember is small, but they’ve played on repeat for too many years to ever forget their gut-churning scripts.  They feature him in an almost exclusively terrible light.  So I don’t share them.  
  
Half the morning disappears under an unspoken fog that won’t dissipate.  Anders sits teasing chords at the piano and for the first time in weeks there aren’t any folders full of translations on the coffee table. We’re free to do anything we want.  
  
I ring up the orchestra office because I can’t remember my next call, and I realize during the automated menu that it’s Saturday. I ring Lilah but she doesn’t answer.  I ring Sigrun and she does.  She reminds me that it’s Saturday, it’s beautifully hot outside for the third day in a row, and I’ve no excuse for my seemingly competitive paleness.  When I don’t bother to argue she goes quiet.  
  
“It’s fine.  We’re fine,” I say.  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
There’s sheet music on the stand that I’ve ignored for most of a month.  Prokofiev to close out an interminable season of Russians.  “Dance of the Knights” has always sounded like a bad dream, which is, I realize integral to any story about the destructive force of love.  I watch Anders make cheese on toast, Pounce following him around the kitchen, across the rug, back to the piano. He doesn’t even have _bad_ dreams about me.  Or doesn’t share them.  It’s become easier not to think about which is worse.  Instead I look at him hunched on the bench and know that there’ll be crumbs in the keys.  
  
“I’m going up top,” I say.  I tuck the music under my arm, fold up the stand, and grab the Huberman.  
  
“Alright,” says Anders.  But I’m out, with the door squeaking slowly shut, as he asks, “Want to go out later and-”  
  
On the roof I can see several blocks worth of sluggish King’s Cross traffic.  Blessedly, there’s no wind.  So, the sheets don’t fly away, but then every note I play sounds stagnant, drowned.  Before long I’m sweating through my t-shirt.  It’s Saturday and I’ve no business being pale and self-important in the presence of the bloody sun.  The rooftop’s bare except for neglected flower pots and, I notice behind me, a clothesline strung between two aluminum poles.  It’s a small, bygone thing, restrung with some nylon presumably by someone in my building.  
  
I put the violin in its case.

  
The Prokofiev piece is a compositional cock-up.  All that intensity clashing abruptly with sweetness and no interlude to guide it.  Poor transitions drive me bonkers.  I give the clothesline another look and head for the door.  Down the stairs and around the corner, I go into the flat and straight to the bedroom as if on rails.  Russians and their incessant, weird sorrow clang around in my head.  I pull the duvet off the bed and hoist it over my shoulder.  
  
On the way back out, I throw open the broom closet and grab my old tennis racket.  Anders makes a sound, turning around (on the sofa now, well good) with toast hanging out of his mouth, but I barely look at him.  The door swings shut on its own behind me.  
  
Once it’s slung over the clothesline I realize I don’t know how, or for how long, to beat the duvet. But there are good dreams to be had, and they can be coaxed.  Clean start and all that.   
  
It makes an impressive, satisfying sound every time I smack it.   Dust and cat hair puff up around me, through the racket strings, and it’s the sort of filth that’s too heavy to drift.  Within minutes of swinging the racket I’m covered in fine dust and fur.  I yank off my t-shirt, toss it over the music stand, and go back to beating the hell out of the comforter. In the sun, all that dander and fluff starts to look like feathers.  Sweat drips off my nose.  My arms feel molten and strong, pounding away.  The racket shudders in my grip when it connects.

“Nate.”  
  
There _are_ feathers, actually. _Smack_.  And they whirl out of the edge seams.  
  
“Nathaniel!”   
  
Sig was right.  I needed sun, I needed to feel it. _Whump_. Down feathers are gray-brown and curly as commas.  
  
“NATE.”    
  
Salt stings my eyes.  I turn to find Anders behind me.  Shock is a funny look for him.   
  
“What’ve you done to the bloody duvet?” he says.  Then he coughs, watching the down fall.

“I. . .”  My sunny haze breaks. I’m breathing hard, an old man suffering for a younger man’s exertion, and the duvet is busted in ten places at least.  The racket, however, is no worse for the wear.  When I’ve got nothing else to look at, the violin and the music stand unhelpful as ever, I look at him.  
  
He’d like to come close, touch me, I can see that.  My shoulders burn and sweat weeps out of every pore.   _Dreaming, or not, and neither of us saying_.   _That means. . .something, doesn’t it?_  But, I don’t really need us to dream of the same things.   Knowing is all I’m after.    
  
The sun’s not doing me any favors, not filling my silence with anything useful.   I should say that will stop thinking of him as a liar if he can give me a reason.  I should apologize for the duvet, but not one thing more.  Nothing comes out.  I stare at the grid of racket strings.  
  
Anders steps back, already shaking his head.  He’s going, then. _Right_.  
  
“Anders.”  
  
I drop the racket and run him down, pulling him right into the stink of me.  My tongue’s in his mouth, lips on stubble, and Anders circles my sticky skin.  We sway a little, backward, until I feel the duvet teasing a soft, cool line across my back.   His kiss is like him, wanting to be jazz, improv on an old upright.  I’m an heirloom grand that no one can be bothered to move out of the flat.  It’s exhausting, or I am, I don’t know.  Anders puts his hands out, leaning on the clothesline, and catches his breath.  
  
A confused sort of acceptance crosses his face as he pulls several feathers from my collarbone, my hair.

“You’ve ruined it.  Comprehensively,” he says, looking at the duvet with a grimace.

“You can be a great bell-end, d’you know that?”  My forehead drops to his shoulder.  The fabric is already sunwarm.

“I do.”  He hugs me.  “Come on. We’ll go to IKEA and pick up another.”

“Fuck off!” I say, laughing and also serious enough to give him a shove. “IKEA on a Saturday? It’ll be a nightmare.”

  
  



End file.
